Introducing the wireless cow

With a technological leap as ambitious, sprawling and hyped
as the Internet of Things, it can be difficult to get a bead on just what it is
— and to imagine how it’s going to affect you, if you’re not the type of person
to rush out and buy a smart thermostat and a networked toothbrush.

We asked David Evans, former chief futurist at Cisco — and
currently CTO and co-founder of Stringify, an
IOT startup — to draw a map of where the technology stands today, where it’s
going and how it will affect the nation.

A DECADE AGO, it was easy to describe what the Internet was and
how you connected to it. PCs and laptops could log on and access the global
computing network. Soon, smartphones were added to the mix, as well as
industrial sensors and other electronic devices. It was still easy to tell
what was connected to the Internet and what wasn’t.

Today, that’s changing. Every second, according to my calculations, an average 127 new things are connected to the Internet. At this rate, 328
million things are being connected every month, approximately one for each
person in the U.S. By the time you finish reading this article, more than
100,000 new things will have been added to the Internet.

And the “things” are no longer just computers and phones. Today,
literally anything can be connected, including tennis rackets, diapers,
clothing, vehicles and, of course, homes. And although people may find this
unsettling, the network is also starting to include biological things: Today,
pets, crops, livestock, and the clothing on your body can be connected. We’re
not far from an Internet link you can actually swallow as a pill.

As soon as a thing is connected, it becomes “intelligent,” able
to tap into computing power from the cloud as well as the collective
information from other things. Suddenly, a shirt doesn’t just provide
protection from the elements; it generates data that allow people to measure
temperature, perspiration, heart rate, movement and more. A connected shirt on
an athlete can improve performance. A connected shirt on a soldier could save
his or her life.

These innovations might seem trivial, but they’re not. Take for
example, Vessyl. Vessyl is a “connected cup” from Mark One that can identify,
measure and track what you drink. Today, it can even tell the difference
between a Coke and a Pepsi. The device has been met with skepticism — one
editor called Vessyl “the most ridiculous, unnecessary gadget I’ve seen demoed in all my years as a tech
journalist.”

He may be missing the bigger picture. It’s not too difficult to
envision Vessyl or similar devices being used in health care to provide
immediate blood or urine analysis, or by a chemical company to determine and
measure elements in a new compound. It could preventing someone from consuming a liquid
they might be allergic to, or help a person with diabetes consume just
the right amount and type of sugar.

Here's what policymakers need to understand: Each individual device hooked up to the Internet is a kind of
experiment, and any given product might succeed or fail. But in aggregate, this
is an advance so large it's hard to grasp as a single thing. Government itself will have broad use for these technologies; leaders will have a growing responsibility to protect consumers while also fostering a key American industry. To help leaders understand its full implications, I've put together a broad survey of the areas where I believe IOT will have the biggest impact on
policy and governance in the next four to five years.

CAN YOU REALLY DIGITIZE FOOD?

It’s hard to imagine a more analog industry than food — from
planting seeds in the dirt to cooking and eating dinner. But that’s exactly why
networking and sensors are likely to be so transformative.

Start with the farm. Farming is an extremely unpredictable business,
thanks to everything from weather to commodity prices. Equipment is expensive;
land and water are scarce. Millions of dollars can be lost each growing season
simply by making a wrong decision.

Farmers are already addressing these risks using sensors, GPS,
tablets and cloud servers to map yields, time plantings and know just how much
fertilizer to apply. FieldView from The Climate Corporation is a cylindrical
device that fits in the palm of your hand, connects to a tractor and allows the
driver to view real-time images of their acreage through their iPads, for
example, to see just where fertilizer needs to be applied to achieve yield
targets.

In addition to crops, IOT is affecting the livestock industry. Radio
frequency ID tags, similar to those implanted in pets in case they get lost,
have been used for years to make cows easier to track. But uptake has been
slow. An estimated 30 million cattle worldwide have been tagged in the past 15
years. That number is small, however, given that there are about 98 million
head of cattle in the U.S. alone, and 1 billion
worldwide.

This may change as concerns over rapidly spreading diseases such
as mad cow and bird flu mount. Already, the worst bird flu in U.S. history has
resulted in more than 46 million chickens and turkeys being destroyed in an
attempt to prevent the disease from spreading.
And mad cow disease has not gone away. The latest case was discovered
just this year in Alberta, Canada.

What can be done to limit or even prevent epidemics from happening
in the future? Consider how fitness trackers for people are evolving. Companies
are already moving to apply the technology to animals. An ear tag sensor
developed by Agis Automatisering in the Netherlands has been validated for heat
detection and health monitoring in the dairy industry. It also shows promise as
a tool for early detection of respiratory disease in feedlot cattle. The
CowManager SensOor tag clips onto an Allflex RFID tag to detect ear movement
when cows are feeding; when an animal’s eating patterns suddenly shift, an alert is sent
to farmers via an app on their mobile devices. Changes in feeding behavior can
indicate illness as early as seven days before cattle show symptoms, so the
alerts can help farmers head off problems early.

Further into the future, many foresee innovations such as
“vertical farming” transforming agriculture entirely, and here the IOT will be
central. A vertical farm is the practice, now mostly experimental, of
cultivating plant life skyscraper-style, which allows farms to be located in or
near cities, shortening the time for growing, transporting and distributing
food.

Vertical farms would be networked two ways — internally and
externally. Internally, small sensors in the soil or connected to the plants
themselves will tell a system exactly how much light, water and nutrients are
required to grow the healthiest, most productive crops. Sensors will also tell
farmers when crops are at their peak for harvesting. The entire thing would
essentially be a responsive machine for growing crops.

Externally, vertical farms will be connected to other networks
and information systems, including potential databases that track local demand.
For example, local restaurants could input when they need to replenish their
fresh food supplies. This information could be aggregated to help vertical
farmers know which crops to grow and in what quantities. Vertical farms would
also be connected to the power grid, using their windows as solar panels to
supply the system — creating a tight feedback loop involving the food supply,
the power grid and consumers that would have been unimaginable a generation
ago.

HEALTH CARE: A COMPLICATED ICEBERG

The Apple Watch is a tiny thing that evokes the huge potential of the
IOT. The average American adult sits seven to nine hours a day — more
than most people sleep each night, a lifestyle that is increasingly believed to
harm our health. It’s easy to read advice about walking more, and just as easy
to ignore it. But the fact that the watch is attached to you — that it’s
monitoring your movements and can physically remind you to stand up and walk
around — makes a huge difference in how much it affects your behavior.
Similarly, the FitBit, and even the iPhone’s step-counting feature, offer an
entirely new kind of encouragement to keep people active.

This is just the tip of an iceberg, and the opportunities and challenges here are increasingly complex. Inside the medical system, hospitals and doctors’ offices are
already being transformed by Internet of Things technologies, as testing and
record-keeping become increasingly electronic. Some shut-in patients have begun
to get their regular daily care via “telemedicine,” a networked suite of
home-care devices that can be monitored remotely by doctors and nurses.

As technology improves, these two distinct-sounding things —
consumer products and specialized medical devices — will begin to converge. For
example, a company called Cyrcadia Health is developing a connected bra to
improve breast-cancer detection and reduce the number of unnecessary
screenings. An ingestible sensor called the Proteus pill, which has received
FDA clearance, though still in the experimental phase, can communicate real-time information about your body to doctors through a wireless connection.

Individually, they might sound like novelties, but taken
together they represent what might be the most important structural change in
health care in our lifetime: turning a check-up into an ongoing process, not an
annual event. And as wearable devices improve, and more sensors are added to
measure blood pressure, pulse rate and glucose levels, the benefits will only
increase — and consumer health and the medical realm will increasingly
intersect.

This raises a host of opportunities and also challenges that
reach to the top level of government. Our payment system, from Medicare on
down, is built around doctor visits, and it’s not always clear how it will fund
the new connected-health industry. Hospitals are already struggling with
technical “interoperability” questions, as devices made by different companies
don’t always sync well — an annoyance in an office, but a life-threatening
problem in an ER. And the vast amounts of patient data suddenly traveling through
new channels raise red flags for health-data privacy regulators.

TRANSPORT: WILL HUMAN DRIVERS BE OUTLAWED?

Several years ago, I predicted that human driving would become illegal in many scenarios. It struck people as crazy at the time, especially car enthusiasts. But I still believe it could happen, and to understand why is to get a sense of just how much networked transportation is going to change our world.

Google’s self-driving car, ignored for years as just one of the company’s pet projects, has garnered a
lot of attention with its ability to safely navigate test environments. Google admits that fully autonomous cars are years away from
replacing human-driven vehicles, given the enormous complexities involved. But
self-driving technology is already starting to show up on the road. Tesla is
about to enable its fully electric cars with a driverless mode via a wireless
software upgrade. Luxury carmakers such as Mercedes and Infiniti are competing
to introduce features that automatically slow your car in traffic or avoid
dangerous lane changes.

But individual cars aren’t likely to be the first place where
networked vehicles make their impact felt. That’s likely to be the trucking
industry, which delivers nearly 70 percent of all freight transported annually
in the U.S. and uses huge amounts of fuel and road capacity. The Internet of
Things has tremendous potential to make the industry safer and more efficient. Just recently, Daimler received approval from
Nevada to test its driverless trucks on the state’s highways. The truck uses
cameras, sensors and radar to scan the area all around it and determine its
position on the road and in relation to nearby cars and trucks.

Connected trucks are aiming to improve safety by taking much
human error out of the equation. Currently, the top three causes of trucking
accidents — drug use, speeding and unfamiliarity with local roads — all
involve human judgment error.

M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO and Handout images

Connected trucks can slow fuel usage, lower emissions and reduce
maintenance costs. For example, connected trucks can calculate and suggest the
most efficient route given road and weather conditions. They can also monitor
and automatically adjust tire pressure in real time. In the future,
“self-shaping” trucks will be able to change their profile on the fly based on
wind direction, lowering themselves by a couple of inches to greatly improve
fuel efficiency and wear and tear on the engine and transmission.

It’s not unreasonable to expect that trucking will soon be a
collaborative effort between the truck and the driver. (The term “driverless”
is really a misnomer today.) Drivers will still be present in the truck to
monitor and control the truck on its journey. You can think of today’s
autonomous trucks as autopilot for drivers. Clearly, this poses a challenge for
regulation and liability, since our current legal system is built entirely
around the driver.

And even before we get to self-driving and autonomous vehicles,
a more fully networked transit system will change the experience of getting
from one place to another, or even finding a place to park. Today, several
cities, including Amsterdam and Barcelona, have installed parking sensors that
can detect and signal when a space is occupied or vacant, informing drivers via
a mobile app. Further into the future, as transportation becomes more connected, vehicles involved in a crash could send a signal that alerts all
other drivers, enabling them to slow down or take an alternate route,
dramatically reducing travel delays and speeding the progress of emergency
vehicles. According to a report by Morgan Stanley about the impact of
autonomous cars, when fully functional, the full suite of networked car
capabilities could save approximately 30,000 lives and avoid 2.12 million
injuries each year.

The prospect of a more intelligent transit system raises some
important questions for planners and regulators. How do you integrate the new
automated infrastructure with the legacy analog one? And if networking produces
the huge safety gains that are predicted, at what point does the law begin to
acknowledge and even enforce the use of new, safer technologies?

So will driving be outlawed? The time might be
coming closer. During a technology company conference, Tesla founder Elon Musk said, “In the
distant future, I think people may outlaw driving cars because it's too
dangerous. You can't have a person driving a two-ton death machine.” He later clarified
his comments by tweeting, “When self-driving cars become safer than
human-driven cars, the public may outlaw the latter. Hopefully not.” It might
be too radical for even Elon Musk to say now, but the fact is that humans are
very error-prone drivers, and the connected future will force us to confront
that reality.

DEFENSE: NETWORKING THE BATTLEFIELD

The true cost of war is its human toll, and nowhere does the Internet of Things have the potential to save American lives more directly than it has in the
realm of defense.

Drones, often called
unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), have already become a central tool of American force projection, conducting surveillance and attacking enemy targets from great distances without putting pilots' lives at risk. But they've also triggered ethical debates so profound they've reached the Senate floor, which are only likely to become sharper as drones become smarter, opening up the question of how much of a "kill" decision can be delegated to a machine.

As the technology improves, the Pentagon is developing smaller
drones to use in whole new ways, for instance to act as the eyes and ears of combatants. Recently,
the Navy put out a request for information for both a nano and a small vertical
takeoff and landing unmanned aircraft system. The request stated the nano
system should weigh between 5 and 20 pounds and be capable of providing
intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance during day and night operations
and in all environmental conditions.
This approach builds on the use of larger, long-distance drones by
becoming an integral part of military teams on the ground, essentially
extending and augmenting the human senses of seeing and hearing.

This is all part of a larger development in warfighting that is
often called the “connected battlefield” — an orchestrated scenario in which literally
everything involved in a battle, including air and ground vehicles, weapons,
ammunition, and even soldiers themselves, is networked and monitored from a
command and control system. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
even
has a program to control and track individual bullets. This clearly opens the
door to dramatically better on-the-ground planning, potentially cutting through
the “fog of war” as never before, but also clearly creates huge new needs for
data management, security and reliability.

Drones, in particular, have raised significant legal, moral and
ethical questions that the U.S. government is still working through. And those
are likely to become only more complex as armed, unmanned vehicles enter more
types of combat and become smarter and more autonomous.

But many of the networked technologies are more benign, helping
to save money and eliminate waste. And considering the dangers caused by the
simple unpredictability of war, connectedness that increases the amount of
information available allows for better decisions, saving both civilian and
combatant lives.

HOME: YOUR STUFF COMES TO LIFE

When people bring up the topic of the Internet of Things, one
bit of shorthand they often use is the “connected refrigerator.” (Or the networked
toaster, or the smart toothbrush.) It’s often easiest to understand a
technology by starting with the things most familiar to us. Some of the most
prevalent “networked home” technologies today are security systems,
thermostats, light bulbs, appliances and locks.

While these innovations are interesting and make life more
convenient, they really just scratch the surface of what’s possible. In the
future, almost any object or surface could be connected to the Internet, where
it has access to intelligence and information from the cloud. Soon, your door
may have a camera with facial recognition that sends alerts to your mobile
device about who visited while you were away. Cameras on other doors and
windows could automatically alert the police and immediately notify you when a
criminal tries to enter your home. There is even an oven in development — the
June Intelligent Oven — that recognizes what you cook and makes
recommendations based on your dietary requirements.

Of course, this all assumes that the “things” we network more or
less stay where they are, becoming a smarter version of the domestic landscape
we know. But with computing, that’s not what happened — computers moved from their
original homes in separate buildings and rooms, to your desktop, pocket and now
wrist. It’s reasonable to expect that networked things themselves are going to
become an even more integrated part of our active lives.

The clearest current example is drones, whose civilian use has
generated every bit as many headlines as their military use. Amazon’s
experiments with drones are a well-known attempt to radically change how
packages are delivered. (In Europe, Amazon is testing a nondrone delivery
scheme in which DHL delivers packages directly to the trunks of Audi owners’ remote-unlockable
cars.) All of these are raising new questions about what constitutes commercial
aircraft, who should regulate and supervise their activities, and what the
world might look like with a new kind of traffic flying overhead.

NOW WHAT?

As Washington wakes up to the importance of this new tech wave, I’d
suggest a few things:

•
Don’t look at your world in the same way
again. The Internet of Things is quickly turning inanimate objects into
intelligent devices, and it’s happening now. In the next decade, 50 billion things will be
connected to the Internet. Consider something as trivial as the front door of
your home. Now consider how it transforms via a low cost sensor and an Internet
connection. The door now grabs a snapshot of your face, sends it to the cloud
for processing, and via facial recognition determines whether or not to let you
in. A simple object just became a very powerful entity, controlling access to
your home, thanks to a connection.

•

Don’t do nothing. I know this is a double negative, but I want to make a point. Doing nothing
is the worst possible course of action. Change is happening fast with or
without you. Because it’s the early days, you have a tremendous opportunity to shape the
future. Action today — or inaction — will be greatly amplified in the future.

•
Don’t be too much of a skeptic. It’s far too easy to
assume that this is all overblown, or that risks such as privacy and security
will outweigh the rewards. While healthy skepticism is important, fear will
result only in stifling innovation. Overall, the human race has done pretty
well in using its advances to help people live longer and improve their
standard of living. Even if you discount this advice as coming
from someone in the technology industry, think of it this way: This is already happening. Skepticism, at
this point, is just a form of pretending things won’t change.

It is rare that a technology comes along that is so pervasive,
so transformational and so accessible by so many. Over the coming years, and as
our population continues to grow, we are about to face some big challenges. IOT
has the potential to change how we manage our planet, how we manage our
precious resources, how we communicate, how we manage our health, how we
educate and ultimately how we live. Your ability to shape the world has never
been greater than it is today. Let’s get this right.

David Evans is co-founder and CTO of Stringify,
a startup company focused on transforming the Internet of Everything.